Here's hoping sobriety won't wreck the music, because with all the Wilco a-huggin' and a-lovin', I'm going to chime in, too.

If you want to enjoy a mind**** of brilliance, like the heavens literally opening, you have to imagine you were me on my 26th birthday. Having never been a big Beck fan, I'd heard Sea Change was really something and was interested. And having never hopped on board what was dubbed the "Alt Rock" bandwagon, I'd never been too interested in Wilco, but I'd heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was really something, too. And having been amped by the Flaming Lips' "The Soft Bulletin," I was interested in what I was hearing about their "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots," because it was bound to really be something.

But being the poor, starving student that I was, I just hadn't had the means to add anything to my collection.

Then, on my 26th birthday, I had an almost O'Henry moment as I opened my wife's gifts to me: Beck's Sea Change, Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.

That night I listened to all three, in that order, and it remains one of the better of the best days of my life.

Those albums should really come together in some sort of box set, because I'm telling you, the three of them just totally go together--it's amazing.

But anyhoo, Wilco's contribution to the holy trinity of kind-of-sad-spaced-out-fuzz-surreality-songscape is absolutely brilliant. It's definitely my favorite Wilco album, but I also really dig "Being There" for its almost haunting premonitions of what was to come.

A friend of mine is in a bar blues band, and they cover "Passenger Side" from "A.M.", and that intrigued me into buying that one, but like Virex, it's my least favorie Wilco album, but that's not really a bad thing. It's really good, but just nowhere in the same stratosphere as the later stuff. Truly, truly evolutionary goodness.

And now that I'm sure I'm going to listen to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot when I get home from work, I'm going to post what I was listening to at lunchtime, neither of which are anything like Wilco:

and

Edit: Hey guys, guess what? If you write "mind" in front of the F-word, the censor-matic thing won't catch it!!